Bloody Breathitt: Politics and Violence in the Appalachian South

7. "The feudal wars of Eastern Kentucky will no doubt be utilized in coming years by writers of fiction": Reading and Writing Bloody Breathitt

7 “the feudal wars of eastern kentuCky will no doubt be utilized in Coming years by writers of fiCtion” Reading and Writing Bloody Breathitt “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) When the legend becomes fact, print the legend! —Maxwell Scott, character in the cinematic adaptation of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) In 1898 the Reverend John J. Dickey interviewed Edward Callahan “Red Ned” Strong to find out what the elderly Breathitt County native knew (or had heard) about his grandfather’s role in the “Clay County Cattle War” between 1805 and 1807. The violent events that comprised the cattle war had begun and ended just over ninety years earlier, but Strong felt it had a much longer longevity. Not only, insisted the retired judge, had it somehow led to the Strong-Amis feud that involved his cousin William in the 1860s but, even at century’s end, “the effects of the [cattle] war have not ceased to this day.”1 Other interviews with Breathitt County’s older citizens corroborated his opinion, although none explained the continuity between the cattle war 207 208 Bloody Breathitt and more recent troubles. In local folklore, the Clay County Cattle War was the first salvo of Bloody Breathitt. The connection contains a measure of logic. The cattle war was the earliest known violent conflict since whites first settled the Three Forks region, and it involved family names—Strongs, Amises, Callahans—that later became notorious.2 Their descendants shed each other’s blood later on: How could the combination of family names and deadly violence be a coincidence? The premise that Breathitt County was an inherently violent place (and residents like Judge Strong seemed to have accepted this) required that violence have an antediluvian heritage—or, at least, Jeffersonian origins before any living person’s memory. The cattle war was an interpersonal, reciprocal dispute between equals in an isolated, semi-wilderness setting with no material implications beyond the direct experience of its participants; for all intents and purposes, it was a feud, albeit a short one. Strong was simply reapplying the most basic elements of the feud narrative to more recent events in his home county, a place already considered “the storm centre of the feud troubles of the State.”3 The old judge’s privileging of ancient continuity over historical and political contingencies may have just been an aged mountaineer’s desire for something unchanging in an otherwise rapidly shifting world. And Dickey may have encouraged him; many of the preacher’s oral histories were done “in an effort to determine why [people in Breathitt County] were always fighting each other.”4 It was a durable and satisfying idea; in 2002, when election-related violence reemerged in the “fabled Kentucky hills,” the New York Times traced “feuding” back to the cattle war’s “poisonous precedent.”5 A perfunctory scan of the historical record suggests this continuity. Inacloseexamination,however,thisdoesnotholdup.Between1807and 1861 the territory that became Breathitt County did not experience any recordedlocalstrifethatresultedinmultipledeathsorparamilitaryfactionalism (or, for that matter, familial “feuds”). When the Civil War started, Strongs and Amises found a common cause fighting Confederate forces (Edward Strong himself chose to fight for the Confederacy) even though their forefathers had opposed one another sixty years before. William Strong and Wiley Amis did not bear arms against each other until 1868, and then it was for the same politicalreasonsthatdividedKentuckyUnionistsduringReconstruction,not age-old kin hatred. The commonality of surnames in the respective conflicts spoke not to a continuity of conflict but instead to the paucity of new blood in a place with large families but small overall population. “the feudal wars of eastern Kentucky” 209 In any case, it was in Judge Strong’s interest to make this case. Men like Edward Strong, a Democrat, a Confederate veteran, and a longtime member of Breathitt’s commercial elite, wanted this—needed this—to be true because it was they who had caused most of the post–Civil War violence, directly or indirectly. Bearing a last name that he knew would always be associated with “feudalism” but possessed of a relatively unblemished personal reputation, he had good reason to portray “Bloody Breathitt” as a saga older than his own adulthood. His infamous cousin was now dead...